The Steam client has received a number of improvements

Nov 26, 2015 13:29 GMT  ·  By

Valve has released a new Steam Beta update for the client and it’s especially interesting since it brings an important enhancement for the Steam Controller, making it much more configurable and capable of better emulating mouse movements.

The biggest selling point for the Steam Controller is the fact that it can emulate some of the mouse functionality with its touchpad. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s there and it’s definitely an improvement over the regular controllers. From the looks of it, Valve wants to make that even better and they pushed a new Beta update for the client that greatly enhances this functionality.

Playing some games with a controller is usually counterintuitive. There is a good reason why there aren’t real time strategy games on the consoles, for example. Also, titles like action RPGs are also not that great and any games that need an Inventory are usually a mess.

Developers have to work around the limitations of the controller, but it’s never a proper solution. What’s worse is that some of those console “enhancements” usually end up on PCs as well, by default.

Steam Controller just got better

If we take a closer look at Valve’s lineup, the Steam Machines, the Steam Controller, and Steam Link, we can easily see that the controller is the most successful of the three. The latest Beta update for the client brings some important improvements for it.

The new feature is called “Mouse Region” and it allows users to map certain areas of the touchpad for in-game spaces. Players will be able to quickly reach parts of the screen with a single tap.

According to the changelog, HUD visualization for large Mouse Region modes has been added, touch and outer edge bindings for Mouse Region modes have been implemented, touch binding for regular Mouse modes are now available, the Mouse Region scale settings names have been clarified, and many other fixes have been implemented.

If you don’t want to install the Beta branch of the Steam client, which can cause problems, you can wait for the stable release and that one should arrive soon.